The Pumphouse Design and Building Works web site is now live – after some pfaffing (with a “p”) to get it not to fail too badly in IE5.2/Mac. I’m pretty happy with it – all layout done in largely W3C compliant CSS/XHTML, with a nifty sliding menu system that should work out to be search engine friendly, and all.

Matt and Anna build lovely homes in a sustainable way from natural and recycled material. I wish them all the best.

This is soo cool… there’s this software called synergy, which runs on *nix, mac and windows, that lets you control multiple desktops with one mouse and keyboard. You tell it how you have your monitors set up, then moving from one desktop to the next is as simple as dragging the mouse off the appropriate edge of a machine. See what I’m getting at? How cool is that? I have been using a KVM and/or VNC to control my setup (see this photo), but synergy beats that hands down. The other lovely thing is that it integrates the clipboard for the machines you have hooked up together, so you can copy and paste text, images and HTML seamlessly between machines! Awesome. Thanks Hack.5 for getting me on to this.

My post below proved to be famous last words… the writer of DUGG, the Australian Electronic Program Guide grabber, announced recently that the source of his data has started using encryption. While the encryption in question is ridiculously simple, he decided he didn’t want to get involved in a coding arms race with the data provider, so he is no longer working on DUGG. I can completely understand this, but I’m very dissappointed none the less.

So where does it leave me? I could subscribe to IceTV, I guess, but I think it is overpriced at $130 for a year’s worth of program guide information. I want to give OzTivo a whirl, but for some reason my IP address is on their ban list, so I can’t register on the website. I have fired off an email, so hopefully that will be sorted soon.

I’ve finally squashed all of the bugs on Dave Thomas’ web site. I’m a dill – the majority of the difficulties stemmed from the interaction between the flash movie on the front page and the javascript controlling rollovers etc.

It seemed I had a few options – fs:command , GetURL or the new ExternalInterface API. The first two had cross-browser compatibility problems, so I concentrated on the newest solution. Of course, this meant that the actionscript/javascript communication only worked if the user was running a recent (8+ from memory) version of flash. Worse still, Safari on mac OS10.3 completely crashed…

Using SWFObject to only show the flash movie on recent players got around this. Users with old players just see an imagemap with js rollovers. Then I discovered that more recent macs (Safari 2+ on 10.4) didn’t play the rollover animations correctly. It seemed that the browser was calling the onmouseover and onmouseout events simulaneously. Arrgh! Fixed it with some js broswer detection – something I try to avoid doing unless my back is against a wall.

If I was doing it again, I would not bother doing the front page animation in flash at all, I would instead use a javascript effects library like YUI or moofx. But I thought doing it in flash would be quicker. Anyway, chalk it up to experience. As I said to Dave today, the launch beer is gonna taste fantastic!

Well, so much for keeping up posting here while I was away. Shanghai was an assault on the mind in so many ways. This wasn’t my first trip to China, so there was a lot I was prepared for, but it was the first time I had been there to work. We really needed to hit the ground running – there were so many things to think about and organise.

To sum up, the show went well, and I was really happy with the work we produced for it. Unfortunately Sue got the flu, which made the performances a bit of a struggle, but I think she did very well given the circumstances.

Shanghai is an amazing city. See my Flickr on the right for some photos – I will post more as I sort through them.

More thoughts later. Now I am going to ride my bike over to Footscray to pick up my car. My plan is to ride really slowly on back streets to re-orient myself. It’s good to be back.